Have takes. Bring receipts. Don't be a jerk.

Argue as hard as you want with an idea. Don't attack the person holding it. Flag garbage when you see it. That's 90% of the policy — everything below is the fine print for the folks who need it in writing.

• No personal attacks. Disagree with the take, not with the human's existence. Name-calling, pile-ons, and harassment get removed.
• No hate speech. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, or any other flavor of "those people" talk is an instant removal and a likely ban. No warnings.
• No threats, no doxxing. Zero tolerance. Posting anyone's personal information — address, workplace, phone number — is a first-offense ban.
• No spam or self-promotion. Your crypto newsletter, your betting picks, your "I made $9,000 a week from home" — deleted on sight.
• Don't knowingly spread false information. Being wrong is human and allowed. Manufacturing "facts" on purpose is neither.
• Keep it legal. Nothing that breaks the law or incites violence.
• Stay in the neighborhood of the topic. Threads drift; that's fine. Hijacking every story to relitigate your one pet issue is not.

Comments run on Disqus, which brings its own spam filtering, and a human reviews what the filters and your flags surface. We can remove any comment, at any time, for any reason — this is our living room, not a public utility. (The First Amendment restrains Congress; it has nothing to say about our comment section.) We never edit anyone's comment: it stays as written, or it goes.

See something that breaks these rules? Use the flag button on the comment itself. That's the fastest route to a moderator — much faster than emailing us.

Most first offenses just get the comment removed. Patterns get bans. The serious stuff — threats, doxxing, hate speech — skips the line and goes straight to a ban. And ban evasion (new account, same behavior) turns a temporary ban permanent.

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Moderation calls are judgment calls, and we own ours. If you think we blew one, email hello@signal-pop.com and a human will look. Corrections to stories themselves are a different desk: /corrections.